Kristi Helvig - Burn Out

I pressed the button and the books erupted in flames, the smell of burned plastic wafting through the air. Hundreds of hours of my father’s work incinerated in an instant. A small pang of guilt hit me, but I shrugged it off. Though my father hadn’t intended it, his notes could be used to rekey the guns to any vibration. I couldn’t let that happen. Satisfied, I went back down and pounded on the emergency door.

Markus looked down at my now empty hands with a questioning eye. “Did you just shoot tablets? Because I really didn’t figure you for the book-burning type.”

I shrugged and kept walking past him and Britta, who just stared at me. “Just let me know when Kale and James get back,” I called over my shoulder.

I wanted some alone time. Once inside my room, I pulled up the ocean on my Infinity. My sister and I used to lie side by side looking at the screen, pretending we were on a family vacation.

Your pink swimsuit looks muy bonita on you , she would tell me, her seven-year-old voice mimicking an adult. We felt like rebels using Spanish now that it was supposed to be extinct too. Gracias, I’d respond, now let’s collect seashells in your purple bucket . It was a stupid game but it made us happy at a time when little else did. My father was always in his study and my mother … well, she was never happy.

I closed down the picture and opened the GlobalNet. Still no signs of life. Qué sorpresa . I’d neglected Surviving Burn Out the past two days. I tapped my fingers across the keyboard that had appeared in front of me. What to discuss? Coming under enemy fire by our own government? Admit to my vast readership that there is no surviving burn out—that death is the only real escape? Unless you can find a group of burners who want to “rescue” you so they can use you for your guns.

I didn’t notice the blinking light coming from the bottom of the screen at first. I’d never seen it before. Green and flashing rapidly. What the hell was it? It wasn’t like the battery could run low since it was powered by my own energy. I took my finger and scrolled down until my finger waved over the light. A caption popped up from the screen into the air in front of me. It was attached to my chronically recycled post.

My first comment.

HEY—JUST FOUND THIS ON THE NET. I’M ALEC. I’M SEVENTEEN. I’m the only one left in Sector 2. Maybe the only one left anywhere, aside from you. Please respond if you’re still there … por favor.

There was another survivor out there, and he knew Spanish. The por favor added a note of desperation to the almost nonchalant tone of the rest of the message. I called up a map to look at the sectors. Geography didn’t matter much when every zone was a dead one. Sector 2 looked to be about where Australia was before the final drought when the government restructured everything into sectors. When I started to type a reply, a new box came up, saying he was on GlobalNet and ready to chat.

Alec? I typed hesitantly.

The response was almost instant. Damn. I thought it was too good to be true .

My heart almost stopped in my chest. Though I’d faithfully posted on the Net each week, it felt like I’d been writing into a void. I’d stopped believing that I’d actually find a fellow survivor.

I’m here. I’m Tora .

My finger hovered over the send button, when my cynical side took over. I typed rapidly.

How do I know you’re not really a poser from the Consulate pretending to be a survivor?

A long pause stretched into what seemed like eternity before I heard back. The string of expletives he wrote back about the Consulate told me he was either an excellent liar or he really hated them.

Alec typed fast and furious. He told me that his family was poor—too poor for a pod city, and he’d only gotten lucky when he found a GlobalNet device in a dead family’s pod. He said Sector 2’s pod city actually had a name—Consulate City. Wow, they were as creative with their names as I was with my guns.

He’d lived on the outskirts of that city like we did here, meaning no dome for protection. Only single pod units with unreliable air and water systems. When those systems broke down, you either had to have money to fix it or you’d be toast. Literally. It was just him and his dad, until their water system began failing and their pleas for assistance were ignored by the government. Alec woke one morning to find a note from his dad saying he’d gone to demand help from the Consulate. Knowing that the Consulate wouldn’t help, he ran to a friend’s house. They didn’t have enough water as it was, but agreed to let him stay.

The guilt over not going after his father burned his insides more than the sun ever could .

Several weeks later, his friend’s home was stormed by the Consulate. Alec had grabbed an old sunsuit and hidden in a crawl space under the pod, but heard them murder his friend and his friend’s family.

I shook my head. It didn’t make sense.

Why? What did your friend’s family do wrong?

A long moment passed.

Nothing. The Consulate wanted the W.A.R. It was the only thing missing when I went back inside .

I didn’t understand.

Why would the government want a W.A.R. machine?

Alec wrote that he heard times were getting tough, even inside the pod cities, and the Consulate was looking for excuses to take the machines from the poor. A new planet hadn’t been found yet and even the government panicked. They started out just taking W.A.R.’s from the families of the deceased, and created a law that it was illegal to be in possession of a W.A.R. machine that wasn’t yours. So many people outside the cities took W.A.R.’s from the dead, but since they were government-issued, the Consulate knew who was registered to have one and who wasn’t. If you didn’t give it back, they killed you.

Alec continued typing at a rapid pace.

I think when the situation in the city became more desperate, they stopped waiting for people to die off and started taking the machines by force. The Consulate probably thought they were doing them a favor by killing them outright, instead of letting them die slowly of dehydration. I heard them accuse my friend’s family of treason, though I think that was a bunch of shit .

I knew the government had killed my father, but killing innocent children was unbelievable. I shuddered.

So a trumped-up treason charge helps those burners feel better about murdering people?

He responded:

Don’t you get it, Tora? Treason makes them the enemy. No enemy survivors. Which really means no witnesses. Trust me, if they knew I’d been hiding out, they would have killed me too—then there’d be no survivor in my sector. I heard them marching up and down the pod streets, and the only sound was gun blasts .

He’d only survived because he found a hidden W.A.R. machine under a pod. Alec’s words sent a chill up my spine. No enemy survivors. Both Kale and James had referred to that earlier. Had James experienced something like that with the Consulate? I couldn’t work out how Kale figured into everything, or how James and Kale were connected.

My father’s genius was a mixed blessing. He’d created super-guns, but also had been able to restructure our W.A.R. machine to accommodate the drop in atmospheric water particles. The government didn’t have my father’s brains. It made sense that if they couldn’t make their existing W.A.R. machines more sensitive, they needed more of them to harvest enough water to survive. And they believed that their lives were of greater importance than those of the “lower class” citizens outside the cities. My dad’s super-weapons would have killed people faster and more efficiently than having to shoot multiple lasers at each person. And if they got lucky and found a planet, which they did, the guns would provide order in the new world.